by Molly Giles
Glo, who had been to Greece a dozen times, said, “I’d like that fine.” So then he asked the second question and Glo said she’d like that too.
“Adam and Eve and Pinchme went down to the sea to bathe. Adam and Eve were drowned. Who do you think was saved?”
“Not while I’m driving, Nicky.”
“Who do you think was saved?”
Kay sighed, said “Pinchme,” and held out one arm as Nicky leaned toward her. The euphoria she’d been floating in since finding the ring had not touched Nicky, and the pinch he gave was long, fervent, and vengeful, a three-fingered pinch, which wasn’t fair. She yanked her arm away, fighting the urge to slap him. It was April 1, and he’d been “fooling” her all day. “Feel better?” she asked, though she knew he did not. She pulled up in front of the stables to let him off for his day with Neal and kissed him, getting a good loving whiff of his sour-milk boy smell before he wiggled free, slammed the car door, and trudged into the shop with his hood high.
She drove on to the library. As she parked, she realized why she liked this little branch so much. Its mossy roof, knotty pine walls, and misshapen windows reminded her of the forts she and Victor used to construct out of leftover building materials abandoned on the lots of Francis’s homes. She unlocked the door for the homeless man waiting patiently on the stone step outside, booted up the cheap computer and retrieved all the files Mrs. Holland had lost the day before, re-inked the stamp pads, watered the plants, tried to scrub a milky stain—grease? vomit? sperm?—out of the oak table in the Reference Alcove, arranged the display of Easter Eggs from Other Lands in the glass case, held a story hour about a Bad Baby Bunny for a group of preschoolers, and settled down to finish reading the sheet music she had ordered for the new Music Section she was assembling. It was a piece by Poulenc, and difficult. Her fingers were tapping invisible octaves on the desk when Mrs. Holland came in, flushed and out of breath.
“I’ve been job hunting,” Mrs. Holland said, dropping her lunch and her crochet bag into a drawer. “How about you? Have you started yet?”
“Yes,” Kay lied. “Are you sure this branch is going to be voted out and sold?”
“Sure as sure. Did you see that article on court reporting I Xeroxed for you?”
“I did. Yes. Thanks.”
“And the one on becoming a dental hygienist?”
“Fascinating.”
“Well it’s fine for you, I suppose. You have a rich father. You don’t have to worry.”
Mrs. Holland’s voice was sharp and Kay looked up. She’s tired of me too, she realized. Everyone is. “I’ve applied at the university for next fall,” she offered. “I’m going to do what you said, and get my degree in library science. I should whiz through, after everything you’ve taught me.”
Mrs. Holland, mollified, sniffed and rearranged the vase of pencils on her desk. Kay looked at her with affection. This dry, dour widow had been a true friend. And I’ve had other true friends, she thought. She remembered all the eccentric elderly music teachers she’d studied with as a child—Mrs. Austin, Professor LeBlanc, Miss Poppy—they had all been stubbornly there for her, aware of her lapses, tantrums, and lies, but supporting her anyway. I’ve had many mothers, she thought. I’ve been lucky. She spent the rest of her shift feeling this luck—in the smiles and small confidences of the housewives, schoolchildren, and retirees, even from the construction workers who came in from the site next door to use the bathroom and read the sports page on their breaks. Maybe it was the spring weather at last, maybe it was the Poulenc, playing in her head, but for whatever reason, she felt better than she had in ages.
She finished her shift humming and was still humming as she drove to the jeweler’s to pick up her ring. She had taken it in to Straub & Levy’s a week ago to have it cleaned and sized. Al hadn’t been there that day, but he greeted her now, as bald and big-bellied as Francis had described. “So you’re the intended?” Al asked, reaching under the counter for the black velvet box.
“Victim?” Kay said. “No. I’m just the daughter.” She held out her hand as Al slipped the ring on. It fit. The clunky weight of it settled, hard, and gleamed dark blue on her chewed, freckled finger.
“The daughter? I’ll be damned. Your old man bought you a locket from me, twenty, twenty-two years ago,” Al said. “Remember that locket?”
Kay looked up, surprised. She had forgotten. Gold, heart-shaped, the locket was the only present she had ever received from Francis. She had disliked it intensely. It had seemed chosen for some small flowerlike sweetheart of a daughter, not her. Still, she had worn it when she auditioned for the conservatory, the night she won the scholarship, and she had worn it again, less dutifully, when she slopped through her first recital there, half-drunk, her lips swollen with Biff’s kisses. After Biff left her for the waitress, she pawned it.
“Your father was so proud of you.” Al looked at her kindly. “And judging from appearances, I bet he still is.”
Kay thanked him, paid him, and, troubled, went into a café next door for coffee. She remembered that scholarship competition, Francis watching her from the audience, calm and attentive, Ida beside him in a neck brace. He had stood up to clap. She reached for her coffee spoon, watching the ring glint as she stirred cream into her cup. I should like this ring more, she thought. And I should have kept that locket. All this time I’ve been mourning the gifts they didn’t give. Why haven’t I honored the ones they did?
She set her cup down. It’s still possible to start over, she decided. We’ve had a lot of false starts, Dad and I, but we can begin again. We can still get to know each other. We can be friends. She looked at the clock on the café wall. She was close to Francis’s office. She could drop in—other daughters did that with other fathers all the time. It was no big deal. She could just say hello. She would not tell him about losing or finding the ring. She would not mention her separation from Neal. She would stay five minutes and leave.
Francis’s office was in a new industrial complex near the freeway on the top floor of a dark glossy building. Kay took the stairs easily, complimenting herself on her wealth of breath now that she had finally quit smoking for good. She hesitated outside the office door, steeling herself for one of his Well, Lookies or Who Asked Yous. He would see her smudged sunglasses, Coco’s hair on her sweater, her faded jeans, the strap on her sandal she’d tried to fix that morning with the stapler. So what, she thought. I yam what I yam. She turned the knob and pushed the door open. The reception area was empty. That was odd; it was still early. She tiptoed across the marble floor and around the potted olive trees to peer into Francis’s private office. His windows framed a view of the mountain and his huge desk was bare. No photographs of Kay or Victor or Ida, but then there never had been. Nothing but a wall full of awards he had won. She turned to leave and almost ran into Sunny-at-the-Office, hurrying in from the kitchen area with a bottle of chilled champagne in her hand.
“Oh good,” Sunny said, “you’re late too. I meant to leave ten minutes ago but the phone’s been ringing. Here. Can you take these?” She thrust the champagne and a bag of plastic glasses into Kay’s arms. “Give me a sec to powder my nose and I’ll follow you out.”
“Out where?”
“To the courthouse.”
“For what?”
“The wedding.”
“Whose wedding?”
“Your father’s. Aren’t you going to witness?”
“Today?”
“I know. It’s ridiculous. It’s April Fool’s Day. But you know your dad. He said it was as good a day as any. Better, because of the full moon. Come on, Kay. We’re going to miss it if we don’t get going.”
Stunned, Kay drove after Sunny to the town center. She parked illegally under an oak tree in a handicapped zone and followed her into the courthouse, up the stairs and down a hallway to a closed door with gold lettering. She could hear her broken sandal flapping as she walked but it seemed to be coming from miles away. Her face felt hot and wet and
Sunny, turning to hold the door open for her, sympathetically touched her own eye. “I always cry too,” she confessed. Kay nodded. The small room they entered was rich with dark woods, windowless, and utterly silent. The judge was parting his hands in benediction over Francis and Glo Sinclair while two clerks looked on. Francis, in a business suit, and Glo, in a silk sheath, stood side by side, their heads bowed. Then, on a low instruction from the judge, they pivoted, put their hands on each other’s shoulders, and kissed. Kay could hear the click of Francis’s dentures. The ceremony was over.
She opened her mouth and a wail came out. “Maaaaa,” it said. Francis turned, astonished, his lips still pursed, eyebrows arcing. Glo turned too, her face white as the orchid pinned over her ear. Kay tried to swallow back the second wail but it ripped out a second later, louder and even more helplessly infantile than the first.
“Do something,” Glo said as Kay broke into the third shrill “Maaaaa.”
“What?” Francis asked.
“Go to her,” Glo said. “For heaven’s sake. She’s your child. Hug her!”
But before Francis could take a step, Kay was gone. She backed out of the room and ran toward the parking lot. She shot toward her car, threw herself in, started the engine, and peeled out toward the freeway.
She could not stop trembling. She floored the old Lincoln, taking the first exit that opened, blood pounding in her cheeks as she watched the commute traffic part to give way around her. She was so angry she was not even aware, at first, that she was shouting. “How dare you!” she was shouting. She hit the steering wheel and burst into tears. “How dare you, how dare you, how dare you!” She changed lanes, one blurred red tunnel opening narrowly, dangerously to another. “It’s only been three months,” she shouted. “Who ever heard of anyone getting married again after only three months? It’s indecent! And to Glo Sinclair!” She whooped. “Glo Sinclair, dear Dad, is stupid. That’s her big secret. She is stupid, stupid, stupid.” She brushed her tears off with the back of her hand and sped forward and it was only then she realized where she was headed—she was headed straight to the cemetery to tell Ida about it. She was going to tattle. And that was insane. As insane as shouting alone in a speeding car. And shouting what? Words Ida had used, on her, as a child, How dare you—and then the list of petty transgressions: How dare you go to bed without drying the dishes. How dare you leave the porch light on. How dare you leave the laundry out. Then that other word: stupid. That was Francis’s word. Francis owned that word. Don’t be stupid, Kay, in his light cold voice.
And she had been. She had baaed in public like a slaughtered lamb. What was wrong with her? How could she have made such a spectacle of herself? All her life she had tried to behave, and then, at the worst time, her true self had come out, naked and needy and wrong, wrong, wrong. Whose voice had she cried in and where had it come from? Was that the voice of the “little animal” Charles had talked about? Other people had tigers inside them, dragons, eagles. They roared. They soared. She bleated and bolted. She must be a goat. “Idiot,” she said. “Stupid dum-dum idiot.” She hit the steering wheel again and sped past the entrance of the cemetery. “I don’t care if you get married,” she shouted out loud to her father. “I don’t care if it breaks your heart,” she said to her mother. “I’m sick of you both.” And then, a second later, horrified, she burst into tears and another raw “Maaaa” tore out of her throat.
I’ve lost him, she thought. I’ve lost both of them.
I never had them, she thought.
She drove for hours. Nothing she passed was familiar but nothing was unfamiliar enough. She turned off the freeway. She longed to get lost but it was hard to get lost, this close to home. Every turn turned her backward; every exit was an entrance to a place she hadn’t even left. By the time the sunset faded she was finally off the map, rattling down a rural avenue east of the county lined with walnut trees. She pulled into some farmer’s driveway and sat in the green silence watching the dust rise into the new leaves above her. Her eyes fell on the champagne bottle on the seat; she opened it, watched the cork pop out the window, and took a warm draught. It fizzed in her throat and surged unchecked in her empty stomach. So I’m drinking, she thought, so what. It doesn’t matter. Nothing I do matters. Which means I can do anything I want. Whether I want to or not.
Another useless rattle of tears shook out of her. She finished the bottle, threw the car into reverse, backed out of the orchard, and sped off again.
She stopped for a bottle of Scotch and a package of cigarettes at a liquor store in the next town. She burned her thumb on the first match and her wrist on the second. She smoked three cigarettes one after the other, then wadded the pack up and threw it into the back seat. What a waste of time that had been, that long hard struggle to quit. Cigarettes weren’t important—they were nothing—why had she bothered? Once you made your mind up, quitting was easy. She groped behind her seat, recovered the discarded pack, swerved across the divider line, straightened, and lit up again.
She ran out of gas in a foothill town that smelled like french fries and wood smoke. Salsa music poured from passing car radios and young people gathered on the corners, talking, touching, tapping their feet, full of the same excited secrets that everyone had at their age, that meant nothing, came to nothing, would get them nowhere. She pulled into a service station, bought gas with her last five dollars, and headed toward the mountains. She’d go to Idaho. Wyoming. Montana. Someplace where nobody knew her. Not that anyone knew her. Or ever had.
The old car climbed between high cold granite cliffs like a big-bowed boat cresting easy waves; it cornered and curved without slipping or tipping. The moon rose while Kay gulped the Scotch. The hell with them all, she thought. Mother. Father. Husband. Son.
Son, she thought. She hiccuped, but thought it again: Nicky. My son.
Darkly drunk, she stopped in the middle of the roadway. I am doing to Nicky what was done to me, she thought. I am making myself sick the way my mother did. And I am running away like my father did. And I don’t have to. This is my life. Not theirs. She began to pull the car around to go back, get Nicky, and start again, but she hit the accelerator too hard and turned too wide. The Lincoln went into a swift, intractable skid, looping backward so that Kay could have the full horror of hindsight—the white road being pulled out from beneath her—before it bucked at the guard rail, shuddered, and floated forward off an icy cliff. For an instant, she was allowed to feel light and aloft in the pure pale moonlight, and then the car darkened, sank, and torpedoed down. At least, she thought, this will be the last mistake I make.
She awoke on her back. The moon was in her face. It was round and cold as Ida’s silver mirror. She heard metal sounds around her, uneven clicking robot sounds, like broken clocks. Looking up, she saw a horse cropping the short grass nearby. She was in a mountain meadow, patchy with snow. The ground beneath her was blue in the moonlight and the horse looked blue too.
She struggled to rise. Blood ran down her leg, filled one of her sandals. Her breastbone felt cracked. She reached for the horse’s tail and held on as he slowly picked his way down a path toward a light in the distance. The old couple who opened their door took her in and drove her to the hospital and stayed by her side through the night. They dismissed her gratitude; they would do this for anyone, they told her, as they would expect anyone to do it for them. They were happy to help. But they were confused by her story. They had never—they told her this again and again, amused by her insistence—owned a horse, nor had they seen any signs of a horse when they found her collapsed alone outside their door.
Seventeen
Francis came back from Greece in September determined never to get stuck at a banquet table with strangers again. Those cruise ships had done him in. He told this to Peg Forrest and she flicked him with her napkin. “These aren’t strangers,” she scolded, “these are your oldest friends.” Francis shrugged. It was too noisy in Le Petit Jardin to argue. He and Peg were seated at the far end of a
back room; the Junior Bentleys, wearing tinfoil crowns their grandchildren had made, were seated side by side on a dais in front. It was their fiftieth wedding anniversary and they looked as if it were their hundredth, but that might have been the speeches. How the old drone on, Francis thought. Ansel Lipscott had been talking for twenty minutes and every other sentence seemed to start with “A few years ago” or “A while back.” Francis had heard enough to know that Ansel was talking about the days when he and Howard and Gil and Francis himself were young husbands with young families, struggling to get ahead. The car-pool commutes to the city, the Saturday morning tennis games, the drunken barbecues that ended up with someone—usually Ida—skinny-dipping in a swimming pool while the babies slept under piles of coats and purses in someone’s back bedroom. Were those happy days? No worse than any other, Francis supposed. He tried to catch Glo’s eye across the table. Still tanned from the islands, she was listening intently to Howard—or appeared to be listening, which was one of her better tricks—and did not look back. If you didn’t know her, you’d think she was having a good time. Maybe she was having a good time. He hoped so.
“Wake me if Ansel says anything dirty,” he whispered to Peg.
Peg looked into his face. “You all right?”
“I told you, Peg: I’m tired. Been tired as long as you’ve known me, if you’ll recall.”
“That’s true. Kay told me you used to nap in the garage.”
“One thing about Kay: she’s a snoop. Another thing: let’s not talk about her.”
Peg pressed his hand. “She still hasn’t called you?”
“She’s disinherited me,” Francis said. “Boohoo.”
“Now don’t be like that. You know she’s just waiting for the right time to get in touch.”
“Timing,” Francis agreed, “has never been my daughter’s strong point.”
“People have to find their own way,” Peg said. “You did.”
